Bee vulnerability to climate change in a shifting nutritional landscape: why sociality and life-history strategy matter

Abstract

Climate-driven changes in floral resource quantity, timing, and nutritional quality can modulate access to essential nutrients for bees, with consequences for development, reproduction, physiology, and sensitivity to other stressors. Although most nutritionally focused research has centred on managed social bees, most bee species are solitary or non-eusocial and therefore experience nutritional landscapes in fundamentally different ways. Here, we examine how sociality and life-history strategy shape sensitivity to nutritional stress under climate change, and how climate-driven nutritional change could alter the costs and benefits of social behaviours. We argue that social organisation, nesting strategy, diet breadth, foraging range, body size, and colony demography shape exposure to nutritional stress, the capacity to respond to nutritional stress, and its interactions with other stressors. Integrating nutritional ecology with life-history theory will therefore be essential for improving predictions of bee vulnerability and designing conservation strategies that support a broad range of bee taxa.